Okay - I’m not exactly Islam’s greatest fan but in the interest of fairness I want to share this and ask:
Is this Islam’s Reformation beginning (or maybe Reclamation)?
Turkey in radical revision of Islamic texts
For me, religions are what religions do and if Islam uncouples itself from all the barbaric baggage and becomes something able to meet the modern world more than half way like much of Christianity has then more power to it.
I wonder how this will fly in the rest of the Islam world?
Probably like a lead balloon, among those who use the current version for their own ends.
Quotes from posts
Turkey is very culturally different from the Arab world. In order for there to be a “reformation,” the culture needs to be open to different interpretations of the religion. So no, I don’t think this is going to spread to other Muslim countries - I think the Turks involved in this revision will simply be stigmatized as heretics.
Ah well. At least I can add some dead cert but obscure names to the office Dead Pool. 
Remember that the Protestant Reformation led to nearly 200 years of some of the bloodiest wars Europe ever saw. I’m all for reforming Isalm, but I’m not sure I want to live through it.
Keep in mind that most Muslims are not Arab, although your point about this not being accepted in the Arab world is well taken. In the sense that it’s mainly Arab Muslim extremist that are aligned against the West, then it doesn’t much matter what happens in the rest of the Muslim world.
Um, sounds exactly like what happened to Christianity. The distant German princes supported reformation (largely for their own political purposes), while Rome and the core Catholic lands ignored their heresies. Really, the Protestant reformation didn’t spread beyond Northern Europe. The Mediterranean? Still Catholic. Eastern Europe? Still Orthodox.
We’re just biased in favor of a reformation because the Protestant countries have wielded so much power in the West in recent centuries, and Protestantism was so influential in the founding of the USA. Ultimately, though, it hasn’t had all that much impact on how they do things in churches in Moscow or Rome or Dublin or Madrid.
But in response to the Protestants the Roman Catholic Church did reform itself to take the bite out of some of the harshest criticisms. Nobody sells indulgences anymore.
I don’t see Wahabbists making concessions to better compete with the Turkish reforms.
Not if the other discussion board I linked to is any indication. Well worth anyone vaguely interested in Islam giving it a read.
But aren’t the Wahabbists the reformers in our analogy? They are, like the Protestants of the Reformation, trying to purify the religion of paganism, and going back to the original source texts and trying to create an “authentic” Muslim state, like the one they see existed at the time of the founding of the religion.
Yeah, the RCC instituted some reforms-- after a few hundred years of the Inquisition.
But they certainly didn’t change everything that the Protestant reformers had had issues with- they didn’t get rid of the idea of purgatory, or allow each individual believer to interpret scripture on his or her own. For that matter, they didn’t get rid of indulgences, either- just the practice of buying and selling them. They clamped down pretty hard on dissent, as well…
And don’t imagine all the nastiness was on one side. You could be killed or run out of the country for being a Protestant in a Catholic country, or vice versa.
We’ve got two different sets of reformers here- the Wahhabists and the Turkish reformers. Maybe they’re analogous to the Protestants and the Calvinists?
Islam doesn’t need a Reformation, it needs an Enlightenment. The issues addressed by the Christian Reformation–excessive centralization and a venal, worldly, and corrupt clergy–are mostly irrelevant to Islam.
The problems which modern Islam does share with Sixteenth Century Christianity–fanatical hostility toward non-believers and an unhealthy symbiosis between church and state–weren’t cured or even addressed within Christianity by the Reformation. In fact, in many ways they were made worse. They were cured by the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution. Islam needs modern equivalents of all of these, not a Reformation.
But would the Enlightenment have happened without all the nastiness associated with the Reformation having happened earlier?
I don’t think the Turkish reformers are analogous to the Christian Reformation at all (remember, the Christian Reformation was fundimentally anti-rationalist). If you have to compare them to anything, they’re like the 19th century Higher Critics, who said that sacred texts have to be looked at in the historical and cultural context of the time that the texts were written. That’s the movement that led to both Liberal Christianity and Reform Judaism, and I think that’s who you can best compare them to, if you can compare them to any analogues within Christianity.
I’ve been telling people this for a long time. As much as we may castigate the Islamic world, especially in the M.E., for their intolerant regimes, we in The West were quite similar 500 years ago or so. And we had to have many, many wars before we set the borders such that people were mostly OK with them, and we got religion largely out of the body politic. Humans being what they are, I don’t see any reason to assume we can avoid that in the M.E. It’s certainly worth trying to avoid it, but let’s prepare for the worst-- and we have a pretty good idea of what that will look like by viewing our own past.
Perhaps not, in the West. But Islam is already at the stage reached by Thirty Years War-era Europe–divided authority, internecine warfare, violent doctrinal disputes, murderous hostility toward non-believers. They’ve gotten to the post-Reformation bad–I wish they’d hurry up and get to the post-Enlightenment good. But John Mace is right, of course, that it took the West a long time.
And don’t forget- we had Protestant-Catholic conflicts, including terrorism, until 1998.
It’s arguable that the secularism we take for granted isn’t due to religious reform; but rather is the stalemate reached after two hundred years of Protestant-Catholic bloodshed that neither side could win. Luther, Calvin and the Puritans could be just as fanatical and doctrinal as Catholics, in some ways even more so. I’m reminded of the alternate history implied in the novel The Golden Compass: the Protestants, instead of seceeding from the Catholic church, took it over in a radical political-theological coup.